How many of you know this place?
Hint: It directly helped reduce crashes on railroads and establish "Railroad Time" or as we know them today.. time zones.
Hint: It directly helped reduce crashes on railroads and establish "Railroad Time" or as we know them today.. time zones.
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J.K. Rowling remains a tier 1 follow and undefeated on X.
@damekatydenise_ You're not that famous.
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If you ever wondered the origin stories of daylight savings time and timezones.
Here you go.
Here you go.
The clock you set back tonight, was established by the railroads.
Before Nov 18, 1883, every town ran on its own sun time. Hundreds of them and by the late 18th century this was a planning nightmare for transcontinental railroads on tight schedules.
So the railroads drew 4 time country went along with it, calling it "Railroad Time".
It would be another 35 years before timezones become federal law and the same 1918 law would establish daylight savings time and the reason you get an extra hour of sleep tonight.
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How did one of the most famous gangsters get his start?
He bought a truck of course.
Dec 29, 1922. Hammond, Indiana. A beer runner calling himself "Al Brown" bought a used truck. The federal indictment charged it as "the first overt act" against Al Capone.
Seven months later, ght was seized in Chicago with a load of beer.
Bootlegging and prohibition are core elements of the history of trucking.
He bought a truck of course.
Dec 29, 1922. Hammond, Indiana. A beer runner calling himself "Al Brown" bought a used truck. The federal indictment charged it as "the first overt act" against Al Capone.
Seven months later, ght was seized in Chicago with a load of beer.
Bootlegging and prohibition are core elements of the history of trucking.
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The clock you set back tonight, was established by the railroads.
Before Nov 18, 1883, every town ran on its own sun time. Hundreds of them and by the late 18th century this was a planning nightmare for transcontinental railroads on tight schedules.
So the railroads drew 4 time country went along with it, calling it "Railroad Time".
It would be another 35 years before timezones become federal law and the same 1918 law would establish daylight savings time and the reason you get an extra hour of sleep tonight.
Before Nov 18, 1883, every town ran on its own sun time. Hundreds of them and by the late 18th century this was a planning nightmare for transcontinental railroads on tight schedules.
So the railroads drew 4 time country went along with it, calling it "Railroad Time".
It would be another 35 years before timezones become federal law and the same 1918 law would establish daylight savings time and the reason you get an extra hour of sleep tonight.
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@chaseshake, how do you think grok bot did on planning pricing compared to your trip?
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Stephen Ruhe retweeted
Great history here. Let me add a little more.
Holmes didn’t just build a tow truck. He used to say a tow truck is built to tow, but his was built to recover and tow. That split boom let it anchor on one side and pull from the other without tipping over.
By World War II, his company was building thousands of military wreckers, and they ran with Patton’s Red Ball Express.
Chattanooga even has a towing museum now, a few miles from his first shop.
Not bad for a guy who just wanted to get his buddy’s Model T out of a creek.
Holmes didn’t just build a tow truck. He used to say a tow truck is built to tow, but his was built to recover and tow. That split boom let it anchor on one side and pull from the other without tipping over.
By World War II, his company was building thousands of military wreckers, and they ran with Patton’s Red Ball Express.
Chattanooga even has a towing museum now, a few miles from his first shop.
Not bad for a guy who just wanted to get his buddy’s Model T out of a creek.
TLDR - It's Chattanooga, TN
In 1916, a mechanic by the name Ernest Holmes and six other men took eight hours to retrieve a Model T from a creek.
After that experience he rigged a crane, pulleys, and chains to his 1913 Cadillac and the first tow truck was born Chattanooga, TN.
l builds Holmes style wreckers just outside of Chattanooga in Collegedale, TN, keeping the Holmes brand alive today.
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Finally my feed is starting to show me other history accounts.
What a time to be alive.
What a time to be alive.
@HistoryWJacob Coffeyville, Kansas, 1892. The Dalton Gang tried to rob two banks at once. The townsfolk grabbed rifles from the hardware store and beat the most feared gang in the West in 12 minutes.
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I have been working on an hours of service piece, this post is pretty good but here are some of the gritty details behind the current Hours of Service rules.
Summer of 1934, Minneapolis. Teamsters Local 574 struck twice, in May and again from July into August. Shorter hours and consistent pay were staples to the strike. This strike would turn bloody as drivers and police officers would lose their lives in a clash.
This would lead the industry to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 putting interstate trucking under the ICC. When the ICC sat down to write hours limits, it said it had "no statistical or other information" on how long a driver could safely work. So it went with: "a man cannot work efficiently or be a safe driver if he does not have an opportunity for approximately 8 hours sleep in 24."
National Safety Council data showed trucks were 1 in 8 registered vehicles, but 1 in 3 of the drivers in fall-asleep crashes.
A 1936 Bureau of Public Roads check of about 7,000 for-hire drivers found 25.7% working more than 12 hours a trip. 4.2% went past 20.
On April 25, 1938, the ICC asked the Public Health Service to study it. They tested 889 drivers. Rested, 9% scored low. After 12+ hours behind the wheel, 42% did. No crashes were measured. The safety link was "inferred." And the report came out in 1941, after the 1939 rules were already on the books.
The order came Dec 29, 1937. It got stayed and rewritten, and for trucks it didn't take effect until March 1, 1939: 60 hours a week on duty, 10 hours of driving, then 8 off. Prior to the study being completed. Before that, the 1938 rules with "no statistical information" was the law.
That same 1941 federal fatigue study looked back on the industry's early "legendary drivers ... who gloried in exerting themselves at the wheel close to the limits of human endurance." A direct quote.
Today it's 11 hours driving inside a 14-hour window, a 30-minute break after 8 behind the wheel, and 60/70. The last big rewrite took effect in September 2020.
At the 2025 International Roadcheck, false logs were 10% of driver out-of-service violations. CVSA says some electronic records are completely altered with no sign they were ever edited.
Every falsified log is a load hauled cheaper than an honest driver legally could, puts everybody else on the highway at risk, and gives an unfair advantage to the ones breaking the laws.
From personal experience, the carriers running edited logs are often the same ones stacking up English-proficiency violations and utilizing non-domicile loopholes to hire unfit drivers.
Summer of 1934, Minneapolis. Teamsters Local 574 struck twice, in May and again from July into August. Shorter hours and consistent pay were staples to the strike. This strike would turn bloody as drivers and police officers would lose their lives in a clash.
This would lead the industry to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 putting interstate trucking under the ICC. When the ICC sat down to write hours limits, it said it had "no statistical or other information" on how long a driver could safely work. So it went with: "a man cannot work efficiently or be a safe driver if he does not have an opportunity for approximately 8 hours sleep in 24."
National Safety Council data showed trucks were 1 in 8 registered vehicles, but 1 in 3 of the drivers in fall-asleep crashes.
A 1936 Bureau of Public Roads check of about 7,000 for-hire drivers found 25.7% working more than 12 hours a trip. 4.2% went past 20.
On April 25, 1938, the ICC asked the Public Health Service to study it. They tested 889 drivers. Rested, 9% scored low. After 12+ hours behind the wheel, 42% did. No crashes were measured. The safety link was "inferred." And the report came out in 1941, after the 1939 rules were already on the books.
The order came Dec 29, 1937. It got stayed and rewritten, and for trucks it didn't take effect until March 1, 1939: 60 hours a week on duty, 10 hours of driving, then 8 off. Prior to the study being completed. Before that, the 1938 rules with "no statistical information" was the law.
That same 1941 federal fatigue study looked back on the industry's early "legendary drivers ... who gloried in exerting themselves at the wheel close to the limits of human endurance." A direct quote.
Today it's 11 hours driving inside a 14-hour window, a 30-minute break after 8 behind the wheel, and 60/70. The last big rewrite took effect in September 2020.
At the 2025 International Roadcheck, false logs were 10% of driver out-of-service violations. CVSA says some electronic records are completely altered with no sign they were ever edited.
Every falsified log is a load hauled cheaper than an honest driver legally could, puts everybody else on the highway at risk, and gives an unfair advantage to the ones breaking the laws.
From personal experience, the carriers running edited logs are often the same ones stacking up English-proficiency violations and utilizing non-domicile loopholes to hire unfit drivers.
Logbook history. Started in 1938.
Back then there were no rules. Trucking companies ran drivers as long as they wanted, if you didnt like it, you found a new job, so the unions went to the government and asked for an 8 hour day.
The government admitted it had no clue how tired t ordered a study. That was the first time anybody officially studied what truckers exhaustion thresholds were.
October 1, 1938, the first hours of service rules kicked in, and the logbook came right along with them, with instructions.
For the next 79 years, till 2017 and the ELD, drivers filled them out by hand with a pencil and the honor system.
Everybody knew a guy with a logbook that read like a fiction novel.
Legend says some guys might have carried two or three of them.
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We really traded these big beautiful trains for ~10 million acres of paved roads and personal vehicles...
What were we thinking??
What were we thinking??
The Mercury was a famous family of high-speed passenger trains operated by the New York Central Railroad from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s.
Designed by the renowned industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, the train became a symbol of the Streamline Moderne era, notable for its eamlined exterior that encased the traditional steam locomotives.
Launched in 1936 to serve key routes between Midwestern U.S. cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, The Mercury not only revolutionized the exterior aesthetics of rail travel but also the concept of luxury travel. Dreyfuss comprehensively designed both the locomotive and the interior cars, introducing Art Deco-style salons, indirect lighting, swivel seats, and large panoramic windows that offered passengers a sophisticated and comfortable experience.
The attention to detail on The Mercury was so meticulous that the locomotive featured special lighting on its wheels and connecting rods to highlight its movement during nighttime journeys. This iconic fleet served as a brilliant precursor to the later design of the 20th Century Limited, enduring in transportation history as one of the pinnacle moments of the integration between railroad engineering and 20th-century industrial design.
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